The air was ablaze with creativity at The Ice House in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, as Carol Barton guided students through the construction of various pop-up forms. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Rare Alignment  which opened at the gallery on the auspicious date of 11-11-11, the class was part of the exhibition’s exploration of how art, mathematics, and science often merge. Students spent the day exploring the principles of paper engineering, combining geometric and mechanical concepts with artistic visions to produce surprising pop-up environments.

It was a dark and scary morning at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. this Saturday. Despite gloomy weather and predictions of an unseasonable October snowfall, a daring group of area families showed up to make Halloween pop-ups. Before long, tables were filled with paper ghosts, pumpkins, bats, and haunted houses popping out of folded cards. The class ended with everyone getting a spooky Halloween sucker treat and a set of my Pocket Paper Engineer pop-up how-to cards to take home and construct. Everyone had a frightfully good time!

I’ve spent the past week at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee,  with a class of fifteen students exploring the sculptural possibilities of the artist’s book. Over the course of the first two days, I demonstrated several pop-up structures. The class then added their own ideas to the  forms.

From these beginnings, we proceeded to design a basic accordion book, a carousel book, and a tunnel book. Class participants ranged in age , interests, and backgrounds, and each brought a unique perspective to the books they produced.

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Finally, a group of instructors and students took a field trip mid-week to visit one of Gatlinburg’s new attractions: The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum. This museum houses a collection of over 20,000 thematically grouped shakers. Essentially small sculptural diptychs, the salt and pepper parings ranged from fruits and vegetable shapes to sea creatures, buildings, kitchen appliances, and just about anything else you can image. And you can purchase your own salt and pepper sets in the museum gift shop. It’s definitely worth a visit.

A portion of downtown Washington, D.C., was not focused on the budget crisis this week, but rather on creativity in the classroom. Twenty-two area teachers participated in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Summer Institute, learning how to integrate arts into standard curricula. I gave a half-day session on pop-ups and landscape books, and discussed how these formats could be integrated into subjects such as biology, history, and literature. The teachers work with classes from pre-school to college, and many were educators who did not have an arts background, but everyone walked away with wonderful examples to develop further in their classrooms.

This summer’s book arts activities continued with the Focus on Book Arts Conference, held every other year at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, outside of Portland. I taught two one-day workshops, one on tunnel books and another on  carousel books. I had a great group of students, and re-connected with a lot of book arts friends and colleagues.

From there I met my husband Henry and we set off with our friends John and Linda Sneed to camp in southeastern Oregon. Heading eastward along the Columbia River, we then turned south to the Owyhee Reservior where we enjoyed three days of beautiful weather along the lake. From there we drove to the White Horse Ranch, just above the Nevada border. This desert area boasted views of star-filled skies which we enjoyed from the Willow Creek hot springs, and a beautiful walk following the creek. Finally we drove to Delintment Lake for July 4th, where we spent a restful holiday.  We had one last day in Portland with John and Linda before heading home.  Thanks, friends, for an exciting vacation.

My paper engineering class at 2011′s Paper and Book Intensive has concluded with a bang. Students transformed their artistic creations with paper mechanics, using a range of structures that included pop-up platforms, props, and V-folds. Here’s a sampling of the results. Several students went on to combine their models into small books, and some of the works will end up in the PBI auction next Thursday. It was a very fulfilling week.

I joined a small contingent of PBI participants yesterday on a short hike over the dunes to Lake Michigan. The weather was brisk with a breeze blowing across the lake, so we abstained from venturing into the water. Instead, we had fun beach combing. Heidi Kyle found a trove of beach plastic in a spectrum of colors, while the rest of us looked for rocks, driftwood, and fossils. Denise Carbone retrieved a dried bony fish from the sand, promising to make a museum enclosure for it.

Stay tuned for posts about the classes. . . .

I’m spending the next 12 days in Saugatuck, Michigan, at this year’s Paper and Book Intensive being held at the Ox Bow School for the Arts. Situated on a beautiful spring-fed lagoon next to Lake Michigan, the charming setting features woods, water, turtles and woodpeckers, and a collection of buildings ranging from funky cabins to fancy new classroom facilities.

The Paper and Book Intensive, now in its 28th year, is an annual gathering of people interested in book arts, papermaking, printing, and conservation. It’s book/paper  boot camp without the macho. There’s  a conviviality here that’s infectious, and most of the teachers are also students taking someone else’s class, so the mix is very egalitarian. I’m teaching a paper engineering class, then taking Jean Buescher Bartlett’s letterpress printing class.

More posts to come on ongoing PBI activies, so stay tuned.

Bruce Foster, known for creating the pop-ups in books such as Gutenberg’s Gift, A Christmas Carol, and Harry Potter, The Pop-Up Book, among others, visited Washington, D.C., this week to give a lecture on his work at the Smithsonian Institution. Part of a series of talks on paper engineering informed by the exhibition Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn, Bruce’s talk demonstrated his method of working through a series of models to create complex pop-up structures. He also discussed how he works with illustrators to add visuals to the pop-ups, and how the books are manufactured in China.

After the lecture and a lunch in the Museum of American History’s cafeteria, Bruce was kind enough accompany me to the Corcoran College of Art and Design for the final critique of my paper engineering class. He recapped his lecture for my students, and then each presented their work for the semester. Thank you, Bruce, for a great addition to the final class.

A group of ten enthusiastic students took part in my pop-up paper engineering workshop at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh this past weekend. We covered the construction of a range of pop-up structures, from simple cut-and-fold versions to platforms, props, and V-fold pop-ups. Everyone did a great job of bringing their own creative ideas into play.

The Society for Contemporary Craft features a gallery, craft store, and a full calendar of classes and events. It’s located just off the lively Penn Avenue strip where a string of ethnic market shops and street vendors sell their wares, so it’s a great place to spend some time enjoying a full range of world foods, crafts, and a cosmopolitans vibe.